In the field of product development, it is important to develop products that meet the needs of customers. Product development is, in one aspect, to determine the physical features of a product by trial and error in the selection and allocation of raw materials and materials.
The customer's needs are not necessarily concrete, and it is difficult to associate the customer's needs with the physical features of a product. For example, customers often make indications using sound symbolism words such as onomatopoeia, for example, “I want a drink with a bubbly popping (puchi puchi) feeling”, “a silky fluffy (sara fuwa) towel is nice”, “sparkling (kira kira) is nice, but glittering (gira gira) is disgusting”, etc.; however, it is difficult to directly apply the indications to product development.
Note that, a sound symbolism word is a word whose speech sound is associated, in a synesthetic manner, with the impressions of the five senses (auditory, visual, tactile, olfactory, taste). Onomatopoeia is a kind of a sound symbolism word, and is a generic term of onomatopoeic words/mimetic words.
On the other hand, the inventors of the present invention have proposed techniques relating to the evaluation and generation of onomatopoeia (see Patent Literature 1 and 2, etc.).